Between Pleasure and Pain: The Story of the Sacrificial Animal

Adam and Eve by Gustave Courtois

Pleasure and Rationality

In trying to understand human nature more deeply, I have read what some philosophers and psychologists have had to say, to get a starting point. To understand what man is, it is first necessary to understand what he wants, and more crucially, what he does not want.

One of the first ideas that caught my attention was Freud’ Pleasure Principle. Simply, man will seek out activities that bring pleasure. This reminded me of the Homo-Economicus idea that I was taught as an Econ undergrad, that each member in society seeks to maximize their utility, and that they will buy objects that return to them a degree of satisfaction, also represented as units of pleasure (Utils).

Being rational, they will avoid buying anything that does not give them units of pleasure and will buy items that bring the highest amount of pleasure. But this fundamental assumption, that humans are pleasure-seeking animals, contradicts the intellectual traditions have survived.

In ancient Greece, the Stoics did not think that pleasure was essential. Neither did the Cynics, nor the Platonists, who though that life was worthless without contemplation, and that the human mind, rather than the body, was essential. Even the Epicureans, who are now synonymous with pleasure, were not hedonists in the modern colloquial sense. They were more interested in a sustainable pursuit of pleasure, which included contemplation, tranquility, and the freedom from fear.

Before the Epicureans, there were the Cyrenaics. They were an ultra-hedonistic school. They held that the only intrinsic good was pleasure. This was not the mere absence of pain, but the positively enjoyable momentary sensations. Among the Ancient Greeks, they are the closest instance of a philosophical school that can be thought of as hedonistic. But they understood the value of altruism and social obligations. The school was founded by Aristippus of Cyrene. Aristippus, who was a student of Socrates, was also the teacher of Theodorus the Atheist, who was an exponent of atheism and hedonism. The school died out less than a hundred years later, to be replaced by the Epicureans.

But the oldest tradition that promoted the pursuit of physical pleasure, were the ancient Babylonians. In the epic of Gilgamesh, soon after the invention of writing, Siduri gives us the following advice: “Fill your belly. Day and night make merry. Let days be full of joy. Dance and make music day and night.… These things alone are the concern of men.”

The more modern philosophers have focused much less on the Greek mission of the “good life” and much more on existential, political, metaphysical, and ontological questions. So one must assume, that by default, the hedonistic mission of the Cyreniacs have no place in their lives. And as far as what constituted a life worth living, unconventional philosophers like Nietzsche argued for man to follow his natural impulses, but these were rarely indulging in physical pleasures, but were either the immersion in artistic pursuits, or following the instinctual urge to power.

Read The Dichotomy of the Self

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